from the camera-advancement dept

Remember back in the day when people thought that having a camera in your phone was a fad, and that no one would ever really use their camera as a phone because the quality sucked? You don't hear that much any more. In fact, it seems that so many people are using their phones as cameras that there's now a market specifically for special lenses for your smartphone. This week's awesome stuff post looks at three crowdfunding projects for smartphone lenses.

First up we've got an Anamorphic Adapter Lens for the iPhone. This is mainly designed for amateur or independent filmmakers, looking to create a look and feel that's more "filmlike" with a widescreen shot. The sample videos included in the pitch video below are pretty impressive. We've talked about people filming movies with their smartphones in the past, and a device like this makes it possible to make such a film seem even more professional.

It appears that plenty of people think it's pretty cool. The project has about a week to go and is nearly double its original $30,000 goal.

Next up, we've got the [BRIC+] zoom lens. It's actually much more than just a zoom lens. It also is a protective phone case and an extended battery for the phone. The zoom lens can then snap on magnetically to the case. The lens is a 3.5X optical lens, which isn't huge, but will always give you a higher quality zoom than the purely digital zooms found on most cameras today -- and of course, you can combine the optical zoom with the phone's zoom to go even further.

The project just launched a few days ago, so still has a ways to go to hit its $65,000 goal. However, it still has well over a month, so it has a decent chance of getting there.

Finally, we've got the iZZi Slim, an iPhone case that includes a series of rotating lenses, so you can quickly switch which lens you use on the fly. The iZZi includes a fisheye lens, a 2x telephoto lens, a wideangle lens and a macro lens for closeups (which is built into the wideangle lens -- you just snap off a piece to get to it). To be honest, the quality on these lenses don't look to be that great, but they still let you do more than the basic lens alone.

With a few days left, this project has already surpassed its $25,000 goal by a little bit, so it appears that plenty of people are interested in having a collection of lenses like these.